Tapes promising to "build your vocabulary while you sleep" have long been debunked by modern science, but the brain can absorb certain data unconsciously.
Takeo Watanabe, Ph.D., director of the cognitive and neural systems department at Boston University, found that we continuously process low-level visual information.
Watanabe asked subjects to identify letters on a screen that also contained dots. The dots appeared to randomly dance across the screen, but were in fact moving in a certain direction. A control group was not exposed to the dots.
When later asked to identify the pattern of motion, subjects unwittingly exposed to the dots were much more successful than the control group.
But don't expect to learn calculus subliminally: "Your mind has to be very attentive when you solve a math problem or the grammatical rules of a language," explains Watanabe. "But unconsciously learning something perceptual, like pronunciation, is possible."
